Consider influencer marketing a booster for your content marketing efforts. It involves collaborating with influential figures to share your content with their vast audiences, proving to be a highly effective promotional tactic. This method is especially beneficial for startups and smaller businesses aiming to expand their reach, as it doesn’t require an extensive pre-existing email list or blog following.

Simply having an excellent product won’t guarantee success, and viral sensations are far from the norm. For most companies, marketing fuels customer acquisition. Traditional marketing and promotion avenues come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages:

• Paid Media: Paid media campaigns can quickly become costly and necessitate continuous financial input. It’s advisable to experiment with acquisition expenses across various platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads (previously AdWords), remarketing, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more, as specific channels will ultimately prove crucial to your digital marketing approach. When executed successfully, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) will consistently be lower than the CLV (customer lifetime value), and ideally, the average transaction, resulting in a positive ROI.
• Owned Media: Content marketing has shown impressive ROI, but cultivating an engaged audience requires time and consistent effort. The potential of content marketing is significant, and establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry through content creation will yield long-term rewards.
• Earned Media (PR): This often involves partnering with a PR agency, which comes at a price. It’s most effectively utilized in conjunction with fundraising and launch initiatives. Successful earned media strategies must incentivize news publications to feature them and captivate editors who curate content for platforms like Techcrunch, Bloomberg, Newsweek, etc. The potential reach is enormous, which brings us to influencer marketing.

Why Choose Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing offers all the advantages of well-executed content marketing – the content’s impact endures, continuously attracting traffic as it’s consumed and disseminated across social media platforms. The key difference is that by publishing content on an influencer’s platform, you tap into their established, extensive audience. This offers the benefit of both immediate and long-term results, driving instant traffic and sales. MORE: How to Find Influencers (and Become One Yourself) So, how can startups effectively integrate influencer marketing? Here’s a five-step guide to leverage influencer marketing strategies for content publication and promotion.

Step 1: Define Your Content Strategy and Plan

Outline the titles of the articles you intend to create, along with relevant search terms and questions you aim to address through your content. Essentially, you’re providing answers to queries your target audience is searching for online, focusing on those with limited competition in search results. A good starting point is keyword research using tools like keyword.io to pinpoint terms and questions with relatively low CPC and Google Ads competition. The chart below highlights some terms with low CPC, low competition, or both:

A quick analysis suggests an opportunity to focus on industry-specific applications and address common customer questions regarding drone functionality. Let’s explore drones used for fishing as an example.

Step 2: Analyze Your Topic Plan Against the Current Google Search Results

For your content to rank organically, it’s crucial to understand your competition. Ideal search results show minimal paid ads, with articles ranking higher than homepages or product pages. While competing against websites with lower domain authority would be vital if you were publishing on your own site, the beauty of influencer marketing is that you leverage the established domain authority of reputable sites. A search for “Drones for fishing” yields the following results (which a new drone company could likely achieve with high-quality content):

Step 3: Examine Content Marketing Outcomes from Google for Your Chosen Topics

Begin compiling a spreadsheet with crucial data points for each topic: domains, domain authority, page views, author, author contact information, and social engagement for each author (or article). Start by clicking on content within the first few Google search result pages and inputting the URLs of relevant content pages into your spreadsheet. For instance, consider this article from GizMag (mentioned above):

Utilize Moz’s OpenSiteExplorer to determine the domain authority for GizMag (and input it into your spreadsheet). You’ll notice that GizMag boasts impressive metrics, with a DA of 84 and over 100K backlinks – figures that would take a startup considerable time to achieve.

Next, utilize Sharedcount.com to obtain social share data for this article, offering another valuable engagement metric:

Step 4: Gather Influencer Contact Details

Influencers who have already produced quality content relevant to your chosen topics and questions are your ideal collaborators. Most are content creators by profession and welcome outreach opportunities. Let’s look at Ben, the author of the aforementioned article. Note his Twitter and Google+ details. (A quick Google search often reveals their LinkedIn profile and sometimes even an email address.) Another handy resource, particularly for LinkedIn, is the Email Hunter Chrome extension:

You can streamline your search for content and influencers using Lumanu, which offers a free content discovery tool. Here are the results for content on this topic:

Their paid version takes research a step further by revealing influencers and providing key data to kickstart your influencer marketing campaign:

With your target influencers identified, it’s time to reach out with a compelling content pitch.

Step 5: Influencer Marketing Outreach

Remember, most authors aim to create engaging content for their audience and are always seeking fresh ideas. However, influencers are also generally wary of maintaining authenticity and trust with their followers. The more influential they are, the more pitches they receive. Therefore, your outreach needs to demonstrate thorough research and offer a clear “value proposition” – what’s in it for them? Here are the do’s and don’ts of influencer marketing outreach: DO:

• Engage with them on social media by commenting on their articles, blog posts, or other content you appreciate. Initiate the conversation organically!
• Reference a specific article or video they’ve created, expressing your admiration for their work.
• Provide value. For instance, offer them free product usage in exchange for their time and assistance.
• Clearly explain your reason for reaching out.
• Clearly articulate a proposed next step or working relationship, whether it’s feedback on a product, collaborating on a co-branded article, or partnering on a full-fledged campaign.
• Keep your message concise and to the point. DON’T:
• Send generic, mass-mailed messages. Personalize your email beyond just their name and company, showcasing your knowledge of their work.
• Make upfront requests like “Please share this with your followers,” which will likely get your email swiftly deleted.
• Invest time and resources into influencer marketing without thoroughly vetting your potential partners!

Speaking of influencers, here are 19 PPC influencers you should follow this year!